Chuck Brown and the progenitors of go-go music built the sound from funk and gospel in music halls and dance clubs across the city. Granted home rule in the 1970s, a city that had become a thoroughly black polity elected an unbroken string of black mayors. The ensuing era became a study in contrasts. The ghettos and business district went up in flames-and the city soon felt a backdraft as the white citizens who’d once dominated it left at accelerating rates. Stokely Carmichael was here, trying and failing to marshal the rage and sorrow of a downtrodden urban class into organized protest. As was the case in many other cities, the sheer sense of possibility embodied in him and the rolling civil-rights movement kept desperation in the ghettos from boiling over, even as school, housing, and police systems conspired to restrict and control black citizens. The Chocolate City era in Washington began almost exactly 50 years ago, when, in April 1968, the city’s segregated enclaves of blackness became ground zero in the Holy Week Uprising that swept over a hundred cities across the country after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Here, in a city shaped by slavery, abolition, desperate escapes from the clutches of Jim Crow, riots, and waves of white backlash and demographic threat, alt-righters and Klansmen and neo-Nazis will find a narrative deeply connected to their own. Even so, as the acolytes of the prominent white-nationalist activist Jason Kessler trample the grass in what was recently known as “Chocolate City,” the historical resonance will fill the August air. The participants in the Unite the Right rally, like many other visitors to the nation’s capital, won’t necessarily find that route convenient for getting to some of the most venerable areas in the city, or to their destination of Lafayette Square. Perhaps their travels might even extend out to Prince George’s County, the suburban last stop in a grand exodus full of descendants from Great Migrations past, where sometimes folks still fix grits the way Grandma and Grandpa in North Carolina used to. When the white supremacists come to town Sunday, will they take the Green Line? Will they spend time on the mass-transit route that connects the pieces of a marginalized past in Washington, D.C.? Will they ride through Anacostia in the Southeast quadrant or to the historic Shaw neighborhood? Maybe their journeys will take them near Howard University, the Mecca, where a fresh wave of promising new students will be unpacking their bags and embarking upon their own academic journey.
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